Artistic Staff

Anthony Barrese
Artistic Director and Principal Conductor

Anthony Barrese joined Opera Southwest in 2007 as Music Director, and in 2011 assumed the title of Artistic Director and Principal Conductor.

He has earned accolades as both a composer and a conductor. He is the recipient of the 2007 Georg Solti Foundation U.S. award for young conductors. His original works have won numerous awards, and he is regularly engaged by opera companies in North America and Italy.

He was the Assistant Conductor of the Dallas Opera in 2006-2007 and returned there as Guest Conductor for a production of Tosca in 2008. In November 2008 Mr. Barrese conducted a new production of Turandot in Ascoli Piceno’s historic Teatro Ventidio Basso. He also made his French debut conducting Turandot at the Opéra de Massy.

He made his operatic conducting debut in Milan with La bohème and recorded Roberto Andreoni’s quattro luci sul lago with ”I Solisti della Scala” (a chamber group made up of the first chair musicians of the La Scala Philharmonic) for broadcast on Italian National Radio (RAI 3).

David Bartholomew
Immediate Past Artistic Director

A native Texan, stage director David Bartholomew graduated from Boston’s venerable New England Conservatory in 1967 with a master’s degree in piano performance. After a period of concertizing in the New England area in both solo recital and chamber music, he was awarded the prestigious Frank Huntington Beebe Award for opera study in Germany. Following his year abroad, he returned to Boston to chair the opera department at his alma mater where his first production was Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress conducted by Gunther Schuller. He went on to direct over twenty operas at N.E.C. ranging from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte to Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. During the 1970’s he directed both Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito and Massenet’s Werther for the young Boston Lyric Opera and created a new production of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel for San Francisco Opera’s Western Opera Theater. He also directed the 1974 premiere of Thomas Pasatieri’s Signor Deluso for Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts in Vienna, VA.

In recent years, Mr. Bartholomew was both Artistic and Stage Director for Tacoma Opera (WA) and frequent guest director for Mercury Opera Rochester (NY), Sacramento Opera (CA), Mobile Opera (AL), Nevada Opera (Reno) and Fargo-Moorhead Opera. He has been on the faculties of Boston University, The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, The Boston Conservatory, and guest artist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Puget Sound (WA), and The Longy School of Music in Cambridge, MA.

Mr. Bartholomew has directed more than fifteen operas for Opera Southwest.

Michael Dauphinais
Principal Repetiteur

Michael Dauphinais is a versatile performer at the keyboard, from continuo to live performance of orchestral reductions. He works regularly with opera companies in the U.S. including Arizona Opera, Sarasota Opera, Kentucky Opera, Opera in the Ozarks and New Jersey Opera Theatre, and has served as the music director for the young artists’ Ensemble at San Diego Opera. He has also performed chamber, choral and vocal repertoire throughout the U.S., Mexico, Ireland and Austria.

An advocate of contemporary music and multi-disciplinary collaboration, Mr. Dauphinais has played with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and collaborated with Art.If.Act Dance Project and ACME (Arizona Contemporary Music Ensemble). He has performed recent premieres of works for piano and live electronics by Stephan Moore and John King. Mr. Dauphinais’s recent collaborative project, the site-specific dance and sound installation Wilderness with Stephan Moore and choreographer Yanira Castro and company, premiered at the 2010 Filament Festival in Troy, NY. He has also collaborated with Moore and Castro in Paradis, the first site-specific dance installation ever performed in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Mr. Dauphinais holds degrees in music from Western Michigan University and Arizona State University. He currently serves on the music faculty at The University of Arizona.